The company has been shedding labour since 2000, and since then a total of 13,570 workers have left the company. At the time the redundancies began, CFM employed slightly less than 20,000 people. Thus over seven years, the company has cut its staff by almost 70 per cent.
Not all these people left the ports or railways: some were transferred to the concessionary companies that now hold leases on rail lines or port terminals.
According to Maria Violante Honwana, coordinator of CFM's Technical Unit for the Work Force, the body set up to handle the retrenchments, the last redundancy payments were made on Thursday to 15 workers in the northern region, on Friday to 22 in the central region, and on Monday to 32 in the south of the country.
Over the past seven years, CFM paid the equivalent of 83 million US dollars in compensations to the retrenched workers.
This restructuring of the company's work force was partly paid for by the World Bank.
Some of the workers leaving the company took early retirement, while others were offered a redundancy package which CFM says is more than twice the minimum established by the country's labour legislation.
CFM also provided retraining programmes so that its former workers could find jobs elsewhere, or set up small business of their own.
Up to December 2006, these training schemes were run under a contract between CFM and GAPI (Small-scale Investment Support Company). With the end of this contract, CFM itself took responsibility for retraining the final groups of workers leaving the company.
"In the near future 824 former workers will complete their training in new trades, with the costs met by CFM", said Honwana.
This training covers not only the former workers but also their children and other dependents.
Honwana said that, with the end of the compensation, the next step is to dismantle the Technical Unit for the Work Force, which should happen by the end of this year.
SOURCE: AIM
